Because many internet applications make money from adverting, they are designed to keep people using them for as long as possible. And they use psychological tricks to produce compulsive behavior[Harris]. These tricks include: alert notifications and sounds to get you to use the application, hiding the clock so you can't tell how long you've been using the application, tracking streaks to make sure you use the application every day, auto playing videos to grab your attention whether you intended to watch a video or not, and games may use repetitive music to put users in a trance-like state.
Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, said[Parker]
... The thought process that went into building these applications ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?' And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you more likes and comments.It's a social-validation feedback loop it's like exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators - it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people - understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.
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God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.
Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook vice president for user growth was quoted in a article in The Verge[Vincent]
Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,”...
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.
He is saying that people post false information to the internet because they are addicted to likes.
Internet apps also reduce your attention span and intellectual capacity.[Hill] When you use the internet, you learn to expect to find something interesting right away. This stimulates the pleasure neurotransmitters in the brain, but if you don't get that hit of pleasure right away, or after it wears off, you go and look for it somewhere else.[Hill] This is why you might notice that sometimes you read a few sentences of an article or watch a minute of a video and then leave it to look at something else for a short time before moving on again and again. This reduction in attention span interferes with your ability to think things through at a deep level.
Smartphone apps designed to get users hooked[Greenwald] are causing an increasing number of accidents and fatalities. Technology companies are literally killing people[Stock et. al.], [Callahan] in their pursuit of profits.
Internet technology companies have billions of users. Their influence rivals that of nation states.[McNamee] Facebook has been shown to influence elections in the US by its ability to target ads to very specific groups of people without anyone except the advertiser knowing who is seeing the ads or what is in them.[Madrigal]
Technology companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter, control what users see through search results, news feeds, advertising, suggestions, and by restricting access of account holders. They give preference to items in ways that reflect their employees' political biases. They control access to the public marketplace of ideas by ranking items they present to users and by banning users and account holders whose opinions they find objectionable.
There are many arguments offered by those attempting to defend the technology companies: they are just producing tools and cannot be responsible if people misuse them, people should take individual responsibility for their own actions, parents should supervise their children's use of technology, etc. However, none of these excuses are valid because technology companies deliberately use science and psychology to make products that cause people to use them compulsively. How are ordinary people supposed to stand up against large corporations putting out products scientifically designed to cause harm (compulsive use)? Many of these technology companies are the moral equivalent of drug pushers: trying to get children hooked early, ruining lives, and harming society, all for the sake of profits.
References
I invested early in Google and Facebook. Now they terrify me. Roger McNamee, Aug. 8, 2017, usatoday.com
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/08/08/my-google-and-facebook-investments-made-fortune-but-now-they-menace/543755001/
Facebook and Google get their revenue from advertising, the effectiveness of which depends on gaining and maintaining consumer attention. Borrowing techniques from the gambling industry, Facebook, Google and others exploit human nature, creating addictive behaviors that compel consumers to check for new messages, respond to notifications, and seek validation from technologies whose only goal is to generate profits for their owners....
Like gambling, nicotine, alcohol or heroin, Facebook and Google — most importantly through its YouTube subsidiary — produce short-term happiness with serious negative consequences in the long term. Users fail to recognize the warning signs of addiction until it is too late.
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Consider a recent story from Australia, where someone at Facebook told advertisers that they had the ability to target teens who were sad or depressed, which made them more susceptible to advertising.
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In the United States, Facebook once demonstrated its ability to make users happier or sadder by manipulating their news feed.
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The fault lies with advertising business models that drive companies to maximize attention at all costs, leading to ever more aggressive brain hacking.
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The Facebook application has 2 billion active users around the world. Google’s YouTube has 1.5 billion. These numbers are comparable to Christianity and Islam, respectively, giving Facebook and Google influence greater than most First World countries. They are too big and too global to be held accountable. Other attention-based apps — including Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, SnapChat and Twitter — also have user bases between 100 million and 1.3 billion. Not all their users have had their brains hacked, but all are on that path. And there are no watchdogs.
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Incentives being what they are, we cannot expect Internet monopolies to police themselves. There is little government regulation and no appetite to change that. If we want to stop brain hacking, consumers will have to force changes at Facebook and Google.
Facebook uncovered a Russian operation "amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights". By Alex Stamos, September 6, 2017
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/09/information-operations-update/
What Facebook Did to American Democracy And why it was so hard to see it coming. by Alexis C. Madrigal in theatlantic.com.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what-facebook-did/542502/
Is the Internet destroying your attention span? We asked an expert. By Simon Hill, digitaltrends.com
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/internet-age-attention-spans-experts-weigh-in/
“Think about the way digital information is conveyed, as short bits of information,” said Dr. Greenfield. “The idea of working on something in-depth over a long period of time is falling out of favor, because people are Googling, reading the first sentence of whatever comes up and then they’re done. People are using the Internet this way because most of the time they find what they want. When you find what you want you get a slight hit in your pleasure neurotransmitter because you’re getting satisfied, and as long as you get that hit you’re going to be more likely to keep doing it. We’re reinforced by that positive experience.”...
“A concern that we have,” said Dr. Greenfield, “is that if you’re not using some of these deeper capacities for thinking, because you’re using a digital device as a section of your brain, then those skill-sets will atrophy.”
Nir Eyal is showing software designers how to hook users in four easy steps. Welcome to the new era of habit-forming technology. by Ted Greenwald in technologyreview.com
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/535906/compulsive-behavior-sells/
Forging new habits has become an obsession among technology companies. In an age when commercial competition is only a click away, the new mandate is to make products and services that generate compulsive behavior: in essence, to get users hooked on a squirt of dopamine to the brain’s reward center to ensure that they’ll come back.
5 Ways To Stay Sane In An Era Of Non-Stop Outrage By David Wong David Wong, March 01, 2017
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-to-stay-sane-in-era-non-stop-outrage
Hey, you know what happens when you read something really enraging on the internet? You get a hit of dopamine. And even though it's a "bad" feeling, you immediately want to feel it again, because anything is better than being bored. Well, people who know how to manipulate this mechanism rule the world. Here's what you need to know now:
How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist Tristan Harris May 18, 2016
https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” — Unknown....
I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities.
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I learned to think this way when I was a magician. Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano.
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And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention. I want to show you how they do it.
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Hijack #1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices
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By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones.
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Hijack #2: Put a Slot Machine In a Billion Pockets
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If you want to maximize addictiveness, all tech designers need to do is link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.
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When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got.
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When we pull to refresh our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what new email we got.
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When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next.
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When we swipe faces left/right on dating apps like Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.
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When we tap the # of red notifications, we’re playing a slot machine to what’s underneath.
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Hijack #3: Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI)
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Another way apps and websites hijack people’s minds is by inducing a “1% chance you could be missing something important.”
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Hijack #4: Social Approval
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When I get tagged by my friend Marc, I imagine him making a conscious choice to tag me. But I don’t see how a company like Facebook orchestrated his doing that in the first place.
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Hijack #5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat)
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Like Facebook, LinkedIn exploits an asymmetry in perception. When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested contacts.
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Hijack #6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay
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News feeds are purposely designed to auto-refill with reasons to keep you scrolling, and purposely eliminate any reason for you to pause, reconsider or leave. It’s also why video and social media sites like Netflix, YouTube or Facebook autoplay the next video after a countdown instead of waiting for you to make a conscious choice (in case you won’t).
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Hijack #7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery
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Companies know that messages that interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to respond than messages delivered asynchronously (like email or any deferred inbox).
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Hijack #8: Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons
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For example, when you you want to look up a Facebook event happening tonight (your reason) the Facebook app doesn’t allow you to access it without first landing on the news feed (their reasons), and that’s on purpose. Facebook wants to convert every reason you have for using Facebook, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things.
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Hijack #9: Inconvenient Choices
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Businesses naturally want to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t want you to make harder.
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For example, NYTimes.com lets you “make a free choice” to cancel your digital subscription. But instead of just doing it when you hit “Cancel Subscription,” they send you an email with information on how to cancel your account by calling a phone number that’s only open at certain times. Hijack #10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies
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Hijack #10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies
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Lastly, apps can exploit people’s inability to forecast the consequences of a click.
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People don’t intuitively forecast the true cost of a click when it’s presented to them. Sales people use “foot in the door” techniques by asking for a small innocuous request to begin with (“just one click to see which tweet got retweeted”) and escalate from there (“why don’t you stay awhile?”). Virtually all engagement websites use this trick.
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I’ve listed a few techniques but there are literally thousands.
Smartphones Are Weapons of Mass Manipulation, and This Guy Is Declaring War on Them: Tristan Harris thinks big tech is taking advantage of us all. Can its power be used for good? by Rachel Metz October 19, 2017 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609104/smartphones-are-weapons-of-mass-manipulation-and-this-guy-is-declaring-war-on-them/
... it persuades us to spend as much time as possible online, with tactics ranging from Snapchat’s snapstreaks to auto-playing videos on sites like YouTube and Facebook....
... because tech companies’ business models largely depend upon advertising revenue, it’s not really in their best interest to push us toward, say, getting off the social network du jour and going outside to hang out with friends ...
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... a growing body of research suggests that the use of social networks including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter may have negative consequences, like increasing your chances of depression or social isolation. Indeed, simply having your phone around could lower your cognitive capacity.
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“Everything [Facebook] knows about me can be used to persuade me toward a future goal,” he says. “And it’s very powerful; it knows exactly what would persuade me, because it has persuaded me in the past.
Our cellphones are killing us By Maureen Callahan June 18, 2016
http://nypost.com/2016/06/18/our-cellphones-are-killing-us/
Last Christmas Day, 33-year-old Joshua Burwell walked right off a cliff and fell 60 feet to his death in California. “He wasn’t watching where he was walking,” Bill Bender of San Diego Lifeguards told NBC News. “He was looking down at the device in his hands.”...
According to the CDC, over eight people are killed and 1,161 are injured each day in the US by distracted driving. Texting while driving is now the leading cause of teenage deaths in this country. Anecdotally, emergency rooms are seeing an uptick of injuries to “petextrians” — people who text while walking and have, say, run into a 300-pound bear (California, 2012), fallen into a fountain at the mall (Pennsylvania, 2011) or fallen onto train tracks (Pennsylvania, 2012).
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According to a 2012 Time magazine study, 84 percent of people around the world said they couldn’t go a single day without their cellphones. Clearly, they mean it.
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According to the Time magazine study, 50 percent of American adults admitted to sleeping with their cellphone, holding it like a security blanket.
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Aside from research that shows our brains release dopamine and serotonin — those feel-good chemicals triggered by drugs, sex, and now text message alerts and likes on Instagram — there’s another, bleaker aspect to our dependence: an inability to tolerate our own thoughts, or to register that there are others around us.
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A few years after Steve Jobs died, reporter Nick Bilton revealed that the Apple co-founder wouldn’t let his own children use the iPad.
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“We have seen the dangers of technology firsthand,” then-Wired editor Chris Anderson said. “I’ve seen it in myself. I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”
Smartphones Are Killing Americans, But Nobody’s Counting By Kyle Stock, Lance Lambert, and David Ingold October 17, 2017, bloomberg.com
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-17/smartphones-are-killing-americans-but-nobody-s-counting
Amid a historic spike in U.S. traffic fatalities, federal data on the danger of distracted driving are getting worse....
Over the past two years, after decades of declining deaths on the road, U.S. traffic fatalities surged by 14.4 percent. In 2016 alone, more than 100 people died every day in or near vehicles in America, the first time the country has passed that grim toll in a decade.
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From 2014 to 2016, the share of Americans who owned an iPhone, Android phone, or something comparable rose from 75 percent to 81 percent.
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These days, we’re pretty much done talking. Texting, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are the order of the day—all activities that require far more attention than simply holding a gadget to your ear or responding to a disembodied voice.
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Finally, the increase in fatalities has been largely among bicyclists, motorcyclists, and pedestrians—all of whom are easier to miss from the driver’s seat than, say, a 4,000-pound SUV—especially if you’re glancing up from your phone rather than concentrating on the road.
Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? JEAN M. TWENGE SEPTEMBER 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/
Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it....
The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.
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Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
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11 People Who Died Playing Video Games Autumn Spragg
https://www.ranker.com/list/8-people-who-died-playing-video-games/autumn-spragg
Any video game player worth their salt knows the feeling. Just ONE more level, ONE more achievement, ONE last item before dinner, sleep, or (shudder) some actual human interaction. Four hours later, and you’re still staring blankly at the screen, mouth ajar, hands balled up into an arthritic mass of digits, and any thoughts you once had about tending to your basic human needs are long since forgotten or pushed off indefinitely as you plug along for that never ending quest for virtual fulfillment....
It’s easy to forget that our own bodies need as much tending to as our farms or guilds, heck, maybe even more so. Here’s a list of people who died neglecting their real-life health bars for their video game equivalents.
Is Social Media Contributing to Rising Teen Suicide Rate? by Elizabeth Chuck, Oct 22, 2017.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/social-media-contributing-rising-teen-suicide-rate-n812426
Recent studies have shown a rise in both teen suicides and self-harm, particularly among teenage girls Sadie's age....
And just this past week, researchers in the U.K. published similar discoveries in a study on self-harm that showed a dramatic increase in the number of adolescent girls who engage in it: Self-harm rose 68 percent in girls ages 13 to 16 from 2011 to 2014, with girls more common to report self-harm than boys (37.4 per 10,000 girls vs. 12.3 per 10,000 boys).
PragerU: We're Suing YouTube To Defend Free Speech — And We're Going To Win ByJAMES BARRETT October 27, 2017
http://www.dailywire.com/news/22833/exclusive-prageru-were-suing-youtube-defend-free-james-barrett
This week PragerU, a conservative not-for-profit organization founded by Dennis Prager, filed a lawsuit against Google and YouTube for "unlawfully censoring its educational videos and discriminating against its right to freedom of speech." In an interview with the Daily Wire on Friday, PragerU CEO Marissa Streit underscored the far-reaching free speech implications of her organization's legal action against what has become "two of the most important public forums in the world" and explained why their legal team feels "very strongly" that they can win.
Family of American killed in Barcelona terror attack sues Facebook, Google and Twitter By Christopher Carbone, October 4, 2017
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/10/04/family-american-killed-in-barcelona-terror-attack-sues-facebook-google-and-twitter.html
The family of a California man killed in the Barcelona terror attack filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Google, Facebook and Twitter, alleging the tech giants played a role in “aiding, abetting and knowingly providing support and resources” to the Islamic State group....
The three tech companies, the complaint argues, have “for years knowingly and recklessly provided the terrorist group ISIS with accounts to use its social networks as a tool for spreading extremist propaganda, raising funds and attracting new recruits."
Sean Parker - Facebook Exploits Human Vulnerability (We Are Dopamine Addicts) - Youtube interview
https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-2508036343.html
https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-2508036343.html
When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, 'I'm not on social media.' And I would say, 'OK. You know, you will be.' And then they would say, 'No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.' And I would say, well you're a conscientious objector that's okay you don't have to participate, but you know we'll get you eventually.'And like, I don't know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and it begins, it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.
If the thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them to really understand it, that thought process was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?' And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you more likes and comments.
It's a social-validation feedback loop it's like exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology." The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.
Our Love Affair With Digital Is Over By DAVID SAXNOV. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/opinion/sunday/internet-digital-technology-return-to-analog.html
Thankfully, the analog world is still here, and not only is it surviving but, in many cases, it is thriving. Sales of old-fashioned print books are up for the third year in a row, according to the Association of American Publishers, while ebook sales have been declining. Independent bookstores have been steadily expanding for several years. Vinyl records have witnessed a decade-long boom in popularity (more than 200,000 newly pressed records are sold each week in the United States), while sales of instant-film cameras, paper notebooks, board games and Broadway tickets are all growing again.
Are You Addicted? Survey Finds 40 Percent Of Smartphone Use Is Compulsive 5Dec - by Daniel Steingold
https://www.studyfinds.org/smartphone-use-compulsive-survey/
Former Facebook exec says social media is ripping apart society
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society
Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media....
Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
These Tech Insiders Are Shielding Their Children From The Technology They Work With BUSINESS INSIDER
31 MAR 2018
https://www.sciencealert.com/tech-insiders-are-shielding-their-children-from-the-tech-they-work-with
Instead of tricking out their homes with all the latest technology, many of today's parents working or living in the tech world are limiting – and sometimes outright banning – how much screen time their kids get.The approach stems from parents seeing firsthand, either through their job, or simply by living in the Bay Area – a region home to the most valuable tech companieson Earth – how much time and effort goes into making digital technology irresistible.
A 2017 survey conducted by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation found among 907 Silicon Valley parents that despite high confidence in technology's benefits, many parents now have serious concerns about tech's impact on kids' psychological and social development.
"You can't put your face in a device and expect to develop a long-term attention span," Taewoo Kim, chief AI engineer at the machine-learning startup One Smart Lab, told Business Insider.
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"The tech companies do know that the sooner you get kids, adolescents, or teenagers used to your platform, the easier it is to become a lifelong habit," Koduri told Business Insider.
It's no coincidence, he said, that Google has made a push into schools with Google Docs, Google Sheets, and the learning management suite Google Classroom.
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Erika Boissiere has little doubt that tech is poison to young brains.
The 37-year-old mum of two in San Francisco works as a family therapist alongside her husband.
She said they both make an effort to stay current with screen-time research, which, despite suffering a lack of long-term data, has nevertheless found a host of short-term consequences among teens and adolescents who are heavy users of tech.
These include heightened risks for depression, anxiety, and, in extreme cases, suicide.
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Boissiere will go to great lengths to prevent her kids, 2-year-old Jack and 5-year-old Elise, from having even the most basic interactions with technology. She and her husband haven't installed any TVs in the house, and they avoid all cell-phone use in the kids' presence – a strict policy the couple also requires of their 28-year-old nanny, who Boissiere said has been caught scrolling on the job.
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Silicon Valley's low- and anti-tech parents may seem overly cautious, but they actually follow longstanding practices of former and current tech giants like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Tim Cook.
In 2007, Gates, the former CEO of Microsoft, implemented a cap on screen time when his daughter started developing an unhealthy attachment to a video game. Later it became family policy not to allow kids to have their own phones until they turned 14.
Today, the average American child gets their first phone around age 10.
Jobs, the CEO of Apple until his death in 2012, revealed in a 2011 New York Times interview that he prohibited his kids from using the newly-released iPad.
"We limit how much technology our kids use at home," Jobs told reporter Nick Bilton.
Even Cook, the current Apple CEO, said in January that he doesn't allow his nephew to join online social networks. The comment followed those of other tech luminaries, who have condemned social media as detrimental to society.
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One of the more hopeful studies, and one often cited by psychologists, was published in 2014 in the peer-reviewed journal Computers in Human Behaviour.
It involved roughly 100 pre-teens, half of whom spent five days on a tech-free retreat engaged in activities like archery, hiking, and orienteering. The other half stayed home and served as the control.
After just five days at the retreat, researchers saw huge gains in empathy levels among the participating kids. Those in the experimental group started scoring higher in their nonverbal emotional cues, more often smiling at another child's success or looking distressed if they witnessed a nasty fall.
The researchers concluded: "The results of this study should introduce a much-needed societal conversation about the costs and benefits of the enormous amount of time children spend with screens, both inside and outside the classroom."
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But around Silicon Valley, a number of low-tech schools have popped up in an effort to reintroduce the basics.
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In their 2017 book Screen Schooled, the co-authors make the case that technology does far more harm than good, even when it's used to boost scores in reading and maths.
"It's interesting to think that in a modern public school, where kids are being required to use electronic devices like iPads, Steve Jobs's kids would be some of the only kids opted out," they wrote. ... As the authors wrote, "What is it these wealthy tech executives know about their own products that their consumers don't?".
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